The best history books of 2011

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Two women sitting among the debris in the aftermath of the German bombardment of LeningradD. Trakhtenberg/Getty Images

Tom Whipple

Published at 12:01AM, November 26 2011

Which is the most devastating war in history? The First World War? Not even
close. The Second? You’re out by a factor of ten. It was, of course, the
8th-century An Lushan revolt. You haven’t heard of it? Well, it was twice as
destructive as the Mongol Conquest, itself five times as bad, when it comes
to fatalities, as any conflict of the past hundred years.

In one of its many counterintuitive tables, Stephen Pinker’s The
Better Angels of Our Nature (Allen Lane, £24) arrives at these rankings
by considering not raw deaths but deaths adjusted for world population. The